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OBAMA'S POLICY TEAM.
Everyone is recommending Noam Scheiber's piece on Barack Obama's policy shop of pragmatists, and they're right, it's good. But I'm not sure I agree with it. In the economics section, for instance, Scheiber is sort of caught between wanting to make the larger claim, as David Leonhardt has, that Obama's domestic policy advisers are behavioral economists, and not really having the policy juice to back that judgment up. He mentions opt-in 401(k)s, but it's hard to give Obama's team too much credit there given that they were prominently featured in Clinton adviser Gene Sperling's book, The Pro-Growth Progressive, and later adopted by the Center for American Progress. In other words: It's a mainstream Democratic idea, not one that points towards a new approach. Elsewhere, Scheiber writes, "One typical Goolsbee brainchild is something called an automatic tax return. The idea is that, if you had no tax deductions or freelance income the previous year, the IRS would send you a tax return that was already filled out. As long as you accepted the government's accounting, you could just sign it and mail it back." But that's not a Goolsbee brainchild: Wesley Clark had it in 2004, and this cycle, John Edwards proposed it before Obama.
Which gets to the larger point: Obama's team may be hardheaded empiricists, but they are also decidedly conventional. Whatever else you want to say about the health plan David Cutler wrote for Obama, it's not the perfect world proposal you'd come up with from a long, hard look at the data. It's not even what you'd come up with from David Cutler's look at the data. It's just a conventional, mainstream, Democratic health care plan that looks a bit cautious in light of Edwards and Clinton's proposals, and would've looked more solidly ambitious if it had come out in 2004. But it doesn't bespeak any unique approach on the part of Obama's team. Rather, it's verging on generic.
And that's true for a lot of their domestic policy plans, the major exceptions being government reform, tech policy, and energy policy. As for foreign policy, Noam makes some good points, but is working way too hard, I think, to fit a decidedly liberal foreign policy mindset into a pragmatic, rather than ideological, box. It's both. The worldview, however, is coherent and based solidly in theories of interdependence and soft power -- it's not an agglomeration of specific policy judgments. That's why Obama is always talking about changing "the mindset that got us into Iraq." He has an alternate mindset in mind that would be different.
In any case, I do recommend Noam's piece, as it's a good look at Obama's advisers and is written with his customary verve and skill. But I think the desire to detect an overarching theory powering his policy shop can be misleading. Obama's domestic policy shop is, in general, cautious and mainstream, though certainly empirical within those constraints. And his foreign policy shop is crafting a pretty significant and detailed vision that is deeply committed to a tightly-defined set of guiding ideals. But the two really are different -- in particular, his foreign policy advisers are rather boundary pushing while his domestic voices are fairly mainstream -- and I think it's really only the foreign policy shop that can be characterized as dependent on a detectable and unique approach.
COMMENTS (10)
Could you please stop criticallhy assessing Obama. In case you hadn't heard, we are all supposed to be getting in line behind the man. Honest assessments of him can only hurt our chances in November. Blind adherence to the everything Obama says and does is right school of thought would be appreciated. How dare you call anything about this man conventional and mainstream. He is the very epitome of new and different. His presidency is going to be so great it is going to make the 90s look like the great depression. We will have universal health care in the first two years once we have someone other than the incompetent Clintons working for it. The economy is going to turn around and grow even as we raise taxes and withdraw from the world by rolling back NAFTA and free trade. The 90s was nothing and we will be referring to them as long dark night that came before true morning in America once Obama is in office. We can also expect to pick up over 60% of the Senate by the end of the first two years of his term. The Republican Party may no longer even exist, or if it does it might as well not because it will have become so unified with the Democratic Party. Please just accept that every time you have ever disagreed with Obama you were wrong and repent.
Posted by: Anonymous | February 26, 2008 2:56 PM
"the major exceptions being government reform, tech policy, and energy policy."
Isn't that a pretty meaty agenda for a potential administration? You can't realistically implement an "unconventional" policy in every area, you're lucky if you are successful with two of them in a presidential administration.
Isn't this more that his "unconventional" policy proposals are in areas that are, uh... unconventional?
Posted by: Anonymous | February 26, 2008 3:01 PM
Why does everything have to be "groundbreaking?"
I'd be awfully happy for a conventional program of progressive income taxation, prudent fiscal management & support for a social program circa 1972.
Posted by: Brautigan | February 26, 2008 3:48 PM
So the entire Democratic Party has moved to the left and Obama's campaign squarely reflects that consensus.
Um, OK. Guess I can live with that.
This seems to me to be a threshhold issue: does Obama's team have the policy chops? I guess we can say, yes, they do. Then we get to the real question: is he pursuing a strategy that offers more promise for actually achieving some of these goals? People can differ, but I'd argue that he is better situated for this than Hillary (he appears to discombobulate the Republicans which will weaken their resistance; he appears more likely to be able to increase the progressive Democratic majority, especially in the Senate, than Hillary; his well-run campaign compared to hers suggests that he may be able to put together a more competent administration).
It's sort of like saying, sure, LeBron James can pass, dribble, rebound and shoot, but that's pretty standard for NBA players. But that's just the beginning of evaluation.
Posted by: santamonicamr | February 26, 2008 4:05 PM
Hey, if Obama can make this stuff truly mainstream then we'll have really gotten somewhere, eh?
Posted by: George Tenet Fangirl | February 26, 2008 4:18 PM
Could you now go and slap some sense into Mark Kleiman? Obama is not running as a Regan. Obama is running to the right of everyone in the primary on domestic policy. He not brining back Dukasis like Regan brought back Goldwater.
Posted by: Rob | February 26, 2008 7:04 PM
Well, if you'll notice, Edwards actually cites Goolsbee in his tax plan. I'm not sure where Clark got the idea.
Posted by: dpw | February 26, 2008 8:28 PM
Obama does not want to rock the boat. He just plans to sail it to safety ... with as many on board as possible.
Posted by: Anonymous | February 27, 2008 1:49 AM
Obama’s long-time chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee is from UChicago Biz School, Milton Friedman country. Academics there twist the data to serve the establishment. (For example, see Goolsbee’s 2006 article to the effect that TV is OK for kids. http://www.slate.com/id/2136372/.)
My point in raising this is that those of us who support Obama must be mindful that he can’t be expected to stray very far from current trickle-down orthodoxy without a lot of popular pressure.
Posted by: Watson | February 27, 2008 5:09 PM
Noam can write, but he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to politics.
Very typical TNR hire.
Posted by: Petey | February 27, 2008 8:49 PM